Motorized scooters are causing numerous serious injuries across the country, including in Denver, and now a California attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit that names as defendants two companies who rent their scooters in Colorado.

Catherine Lerer, the attorney who represents nine plaintiffs, said her lawsuit is limited to California but hinted that legal action may soon come from Colorado lawyers. She said she has received phone calls from people injured on the scooters in Colorado.

“This is a nation-wide issue,” said Catherine Lerer, attorney for nine plaintiffs who were injured in motorized scooter accidents. “It’s a super dangerous vehicle.”

The class action lawsuit was filed Friday against Bird, Lime, Xiaomi and Segway. Bird and Lime market their scooters in Colorado.

When contacted about the lawsuit, Bird responded in an email with a statement about protecting the environment, which is part of its philosophy behind the scooter business.

“Class action attorneys with a real interest in improving transportation safety should be focused on reducing the 40,000 deaths caused by cars every year in the U.S. At Bird, safety is our very top priority, and it drives our mission to get cars off the road to make cities safer and more livable. The climate crisis and our car
addiction demand a transportation mode shift to cleaner, affordable vehicles. Shared e-scooters are already replacing millions of short car trips and the pollution that comes with them, and we at Bird will
continue to work with cities to help them redesign their transportation networks so that they are safer and cleaner,” the statement said.

Lime representatives did not immediately return messages on Tuesday.

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs, who suffered broken bones, deep cuts requiring stitches and broken teeth, are seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages against the scooter companies, which have deployed “fleets of defective scooters,” the lawsuit says.

“While acting under the guise of the commendable goals of furthering personal freedom and mobility and protecting the environment, the defendants … are endangering the health, safety and welfare of riders, pedestrians and the general public,” the lawsuit says.

The scooters have triggered civil unrest in California, the lawsuit says. People have thrown the scooters into trash cans, Dumpsters, Venice, Calif. canals and the Pacific Ocean, the lawsuit says. Other people have buried them in sand and lit them on fire, it says.

One of the plaintiffs – a boy – suffered severe damage to eight teeth and had stitches to his lip on July 13 when someone on a Lime scooter collided into the boy, the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs also include scooter riders.

Keith Finkelstein crashed when the accelerator of his scooter locked up, causing him to lose control and fall off. He suffered injuries to his rib cage, both knees, right elbow, his right hip and buttocks, the lawsuit says.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.

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